The hard question for Anarchism and Libertarianism is “How do we protect children?” So how do we protect children?

 . . . as answered on Quora. . . .

The legal status of children in a regime of liberty would seem to be a problem, at least theoretically. In The Methods of Ethics, in his two-page critique of the libertarian idea, Henry Sidgwick regarded this as one of the most obvious difficulties. But, to get into the spirit of his criticism, let us consider how he characterizes the libertarian notion of justice:

There is . . . one mode of systematizing these Rights and bringing them under one principle, which has been maintained by influential thinkers, and therefore deserves careful examination. Many jurists have laid down that Freedom from interference is really the whole of what human beings, originally and apart from contracts, can be strictly said to owe to each other: at any rate, that the protection of this Freedom (including the enforcement of Free Contract) is the sole proper aim of Law, i.e., of those rules of mutual behaviour which are coercive and maintained by penalties. All Natural Rights, on this view, may be summed up in the Right of Freedom: so that the complete attainment of this is the complete realization of Justice; the Equality at which Justice is thought to aim being interpreted in this special sense of Equality of Freedom.

This is a very precise, steel-manned statement of the Law of Equal Freedom promoted by Sidgwick’s liberal contemporary Herbert Spencer.

Within this vision of social order, however, how would children fit? Children do not have the liberties of adults in any society known to man. And not without reason. Children are by their nature weak; ignorant; foolish; irresponsible; and on their own often endangered and not infrequently dangerous — almost by definition. Sidgwick states the problem concisely:

[I]t seems needful to limit somewhat arbitrarily the extent of its application. For it involves the negative principle that no one should be coerced for his own good alone: but no one would gravely argue that this ought to be applied to the case of children, or of idiots, or insane persons.

But the Libertarian Party, back in the 1970s, had in its platform a plank on children’s rights stating a simple principle: “Children have the same rights that adults have.” [from memory]

Now, I was 20 when I read that. And, though I called myself a libertarian soon after, I did so while recognizing that the Children’s Rights plank was, almost self-evidently, idiotic.

A quick view of the most similar plank of the platform of the current Libertarian Party of the United States, we see this:

Parental Rights

Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs, provided that the rights of children to be free from abuse and neglect are also protected.

Much more circumspect.

But it doesn’t seem very “libertarian,” does it? Libertarians defend rights to liberty, not rights “not to be neglected,” which is merely a curiously negative formulation of a positive right, with the right’s corresponding positive duty.

There are three basic positions libertarians have held about children’s rights:

  1. Children are property of their parents.
  2. Children are free.
  3. Children have certain positive rights against their parents, which may be enforced by third parties.

I hold, with some necessary nuance, to the third position. Individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker held to the first, as many readers of his journal Liberty: Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order found to their shock. The second position — which I regard as preposterous — has been upheld by numerous libertarians, but none more ably than anarchist-communist Viroqua Daniels in the pages of The Firebrand, a fin de siècle anarchist rag from Portland, Oregon.

The evolution of Herbert Spencer’s view of the matter is instructive, but a full analysis would require a treatise. Consult the first edition of Social Statics with the abridged and revised edition, and especially with the chapter on children’s rights in the fourth part of The Principles of Ethics, the fascinating Justice. Spencer derived his view of a political-legal normative order from the “law of life” that, among adults, “benefits received must be in proportion to merits possessed” while for children, prior to the development of the capacity to cooperate productively, benefits must be directed in reverse proportion to merit. Both children and adults have a right to life, in this view, but this expresses itself in two distinct regimes: children requiring sustenance, and sustenance and education being therefore a right; adults capable of reciprocity and mutually advantageous cooperation, therefore for the fullest flowering of advance there must be rights to liberty.

Spencer thus elaborated, in his mature philosophy, a variant of the third position I suggested above.

One way to look at these basic rights is to take antagonism and menace as a given, and see how basic rights can prevent calamity. A right to freedom prevents parasitism and predation from strangers and neighbors, a state of liberty being the compromise position between A killing B and B killing A; A stealing from B and B stealing from A. Because adults are capable of reciprocal action, including the negotiation required to cooperate, freedom makes sense, because it promotes general advance and wealth and health, etc.

A child, on the other hand, starts out with such limited skills and even limited capacities of self-control that he or she cannot work to acquire property or maintain it, or even be trusted to trade it. So children constitute a standing threat, of sorts. Their freedom doesn’t prevent outrageous moral horror — it can even increase it, straining adults’ resources. Which is why their freedom even in a free society has been limited, and responsibility for their actions placed upon those who bring them into the social world (usually their parents). Further, parents are usually charged with the responsibility — indeed, obligation — to feed, clothe and house their own children, and instruct them so that, upon maturation, they can become responsible adults.

The point of basic rights is to distribute responsibility broadly so to decrease burdens and allow progress. Adults should not be burdensome to other adults, so that the burden of raising children — who do actually require great sacrifice — can be efficaciously met.

Which is why libertarians criticize socialized education efforts. For that is a move away from distributed responsibility to centralized responsibility, and generally makes adults less responsible. And, over the generations, state-run education raises children who become adults with decreasing senses of their own capacity to govern their lives. In a truly free society, children possess basic rights, but the obligations to meet those rights would fall upon parents and guardians, not on society at large through the agency of an activist state.

Which leads to the current outrageous moral horror of the current pandemic panic, with whole societies acting in utter cowardice and servility to “the experts” — who prove themselves to be liars as well as reckless gamblers with fate.

Libertarians, as I see it, would protect children with a rule of law and with a distributed — not centralized — regime of responsibility. A free society is a responsibilitarian society. Children would grow up in such societies to possess virtues, not “be good consumers” or loyal voters of political factions.

Children are not adults, and do not have — should not have — the exact same set of basic legal rights. But the rights they would possess in a free society should enable them to mature into the status of free individuals capable of reciprocity, self-defense, defense of others, and of negotiating cooperative endeavors for mutual benefit and (thus) the progress of society at large.

twv